Tuesday Thoughts: Perspective & Weight

Hey,

So, I was looking through old pictures of me and my friends from high school. I found a picture of me from February '06 and thought "Wow, I was skinny then. Jeeze, I need to get back into shape." After a few minutes of thinking I remembered that day perfectly and what was happening at the time. Since I was in ballet, I'd have to drop like 10-15 pounds at any given time if I realized that I didn't fit into a costume. A lot of times you'd have to change yourself to fit the costume, not change the costume to fit you. Here's the picture of me:

At the time this picture (above) was taken, I was trying to drop 10 pounds. Three weeks later I had dropped the weight (through exercise and diet, don't worry I've never had an eating disorder of any kind) and I took this picture (below):

Here I am March '06 and about 8 pounds lighter than the 1st picture. You know what's even more interesting? The costume fit just a little snug but they took it in half an inch so that meant that I'd I have to loose at least another 5-7 pounds before the performance.

And guess what? I was one of the two or three 'fat' girls. If I actually gave into an eating disorder I probably would have been one of the skinny girls.

I was going to ballet 6 days a week, about 20-30 hours a week plus the gym 5 days a week (about 2 in the gym each time I went).

Funny thing was when I went to the doctor one year ('04), she walked and w/o looking at me, told me that I was about 15 pounds over weight (at 120 lbs). She told me that I had I needed to start exercising to get into shape. I stood up and told her that I took ballet 5 days a week and worked out at the gym 4 days a week (this was when I was 15) to cross train. She finally looked up from her charts and saw that I was a zero in jeans size and then proceeded to tell me that I had an eating disorder. Yeah, I know. One minute I'm overweight and the next I'm supposedly anorexic. Needless to say my mother and I walked out in the middle of the appointment and then changed doctors.


Overall, my point of this post is everything is about perspective. From one point of view, I needed to loose more weight and from another I was perfectly fine. I've never bought into the media's bullshit about girls needing to be super model skinny but it's crazy realizing how thin I was back in high school. Over time the facts start to change. Back when I took the 1st picture, the facts were that I needed to loose weight because I wouldn't fit into any of the costumes if I didn't. Now the facts are that I was perfectly fine and I really didn't need to double up my gym time and amp up my fruits & veggies intake.

And again, no I was never anorexic or bulimic (ew!), my caloric intake was insanely high-- more like a swimmer's diet than the typical ballerina. I would eat about 6 medium meals a day + fruit for snacks (I LOVE FRUIT!). When I stopped ballet and exercising, I put on about 40 pounds in a blink of an eye. I stopped ballet, but I forgot to adjust my eating habits to match my lack of exercise (aka I was still eating 6 meals a day). Of course, now I've lost most of that weight but still, it's all about perspective.

The thing is, if someone tells you that you are fat-- don't listen. Do you think that I was fat in either of those pictures? Yeah, I didn't think that I was at the time and I definitely don't think so now. But at the time I had people pressuring me to join them in their anorexic or bulimic 'clubs', I was put down for being larger than the other girls in ballet. You know, the double edged comments that your frenemies will say like "Oh, these jeans would look SO cute on you if you were smaller”.

More later,

~Genevieve